The Physical Internet and hyperconnected logistics concepts promise an open, more efficient and environmentally friendly supply chain for goods. Blockchain and Internet of Things technologies are increasingly regarded as main enablers of improvements in this domain. We describe how blockchain and smart contracts present the potential of being applied to hyperconnected logistics by showing a concrete example of its implementation. S upply chain logistics is a highly competitive and legally sensitive industry, where several protagonists with diverse capabilities and goals have to cooperate to fulfill each customer demand. The di ferent actors involved do not necessarily trust each other, and therefore rarely share their goods handling or IT infrastructure; this has been recognized as a major cause of ine ficiency [ ]. The concept of Physical Internet [ ] is an emerging paradigm that aims to increase supply chain e ficiency in terms of goods handling, routing and storage, as well as to improve its economical, environmental and social sustainability.In order to fulfill this promise, the Physical Internet takes advantage of disruptive new technologies. For example, much prior research points out growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) as a technology that can improve the e ficiency of the supply chain [ , , , , ]. In addition, blockchain technologies and their implementations [ , , , , , ] make possible for all intervening parties to share an open and trustworthy information system, thus reducing the risk of failures or fraud.The integration of these various technologies into a cohesive system, however, still remains an open challenge. In the following, we present recent progress made on the application of blockchain and smart contracts to the Physical Internet, and hyperconnected logistics in particular, via a concrete implementation to an existing simulation designed with AnyLogic, a widely used simulation platform. A SIMPLE HYPERCONNECTED LOGISTICS SCE-NARIOThe hyperconnected logistics paradigm [ , ] aims, among other things, at improving the e ficiency of goods delivery in terms of package routing, delivery speed and inventory management. This is achieved by evolving away from a hub-and-spoke architecture towards so-called hyperconnected networks [ ]. In this model, shown in Figure , the entire world can be split at the smallest scale into unit zones, whose size depends on expected demand density. Adjacent unit zones are grouped into local cells, which in turn are gathered into areas, which form regions. Simultaneously, several hub networks are defined to link these di ferent layers: access hubs link unit zones together; local hubs link local cells, and gateway hubs link areas. Di ferent hub levels may exist inside the same physical entity (e.g., a local hub might also be an access hub), thus allowing 1 IT Professional
Artifact-centric workflows describe possible executions of a business process through constraints expressed from the point of view of the documents exchanged between principals. A sequence of manipulations is deemed valid as long as every document in the workflow follows its prescribed lifecycle at all steps of the process. So far, establishing that a given workflow complies with artifact lifecycles has mostly been done through static verification, or by assuming a centralized access to all artifacts where these constraints can be monitored and enforced. We present in this paper an alternate method of enforcing document lifecycles that requires neither static verification nor single-point access. Rather, the document itself is designed to carry fragments of its history, protected from tampering using hashing and public-key encryption. Any principal involved in the process can verify at any time that the history of a document complies with a given lifecycle. Moreover, the proposed system also enforces access permissions: not all actions are visible to all principals, and one can only modify and verify what one is allowed to observe. These concepts have been implemented in a software library called Artichoke, and empirically tested for performance and scalability.
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